


Discriminating Tastes

by threewalls



Series: Schirra [56]
Category: Final Fantasy XII
Genre: 709 OV, Archadia, F/M, Non Consensual, Partnership, Piercings, Rape, Rape Recovery, Xenophobia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-04-21
Updated: 2008-04-21
Packaged: 2017-10-15 10:11:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,754
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/159774
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/threewalls/pseuds/threewalls
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><cite>Not a pirate, not Balthier's bounty, they had wanted a viera.</cite></p>
            </blockquote>





	Discriminating Tastes

**Author's Note:**

> Written with thanks to lynndyre for beta and Balthier!muse.

"Fran!"

She finds Balthier on the first-storey landing, he running high on his toes, she hobbling on flat feet. He glances a thousand questions over her: her dress, her vertigo, how she escaped. The floor trembles-- they both reach for the balustrade-- as something cracks beneath them.

"I took the liberty of arranging a few, minor distractions."

Balthier's grin is wonderful; she smiles. Fran points to the stairwell. He slides beneath her raised arm, the length of his body steadying hers. They ascend together.

The first door they pass is open, the second locked. Thudding footsteps, shouts-- gunfire-- but all from below. Leaning against the wall, Fran offers him one of the many pins from her hair, but Balthier is already on his knees, ear to the wood, a pick in his hand and another in his mouth. They'd taken only his weapons, then, and taken even her shoes. Balthier kicks the door shut behind them, locking, jamming the fixture with the pick.

"A gentleman's study," he disdains it, though "no one out here could be classed a true gentleman." Balthier arcs his arm across the wide, wooden writing desk in front of them, sending everything: papers, cartridge pens, stones, scattering to the floor. Fran is not concerned. Archadians build their walls thick, even here. Stalking back across the room, Balthier rips books from the wooden case beside the door, another brief shower of ink-variegated paper, leather and skin, before shouldering the case hard to cover the door.

They have never thieved in Archades. Both before and after their _great adventure_ , there have been men there Balthier does not wish to disappoint. But Archadia is much larger than the one city. Provincial governors are drawn from the same worthy families that fill the senate and judiciary, sharing their wealth and egotism of whim, while their distance from the capital sharpens their appetites for novelty. Their manses make excellent marks, filled as they are with the objects of their satisfaction. However, they journeyed hither to Romanby to refuel, to take in rumour and supplies. Not this.

Settled on the desk, Fran feels relief to have her weight off her heels. Amongst the gossamer silks with which they had draped her, she finds the fastening brooches and undoes them, one by one, allowing the silk to fall where it would. Hairpins litter the chequered rug, gnarled with white hair. Fran spreads her thighs, pushing herself closer to the edge of the desk, measuring the pull of tensed muscles against the overtired, distracting pulse of her blood.

"--doubt they expect us to be panicking with the same avid stupidity as they're exhibiting. To be running around and down and--"

"Balthier."

Fran holds out her hand. She has had his attention since she found him, but he will not look at her. His eyes have caught the tangle of her unbound hair, the bare curve of her back, the abrasions on her knees, and darted away. Now, standing before her, he looks down, and up, and to the side, anywhere but her face. Balthier's nostrils flare as he breathes more quickly, almost too quickly, and his shoulders become hunched.

"Those drinks in the free house. They hit me, but they drugged you. They wanted you."

Fran inclines her head in agreement; not a pirate, not Balthier's bounty, they had wanted a viera. She awoke in that room downstairs less than an hour before, the cure spell their jeweller cast upon her dispelling the last of the drugs. They had costumed her in their hume fantasy of her race, leaf-dappled panels of silk that branches if not beasts would tear, golden circular brooches to match the hoops in her ears, her nipples, and her labia. Three and one and six per side, Fran had unhooked the foremost herself (humes do not know what such piercings mean, do not know that they were not for her), but the latter are too fine-wrought, their catches too delicate for viera nails. It is good to have a partner.

Balthier's fingers have tightened on hers, and so Fran has a ready grip when he would pull away, when she directs their hands closer to her lap.

"Your fingers are more dextrous than mine."

Balthier exhales, but he crouches down to assist her. She can hear him breathing through his mouth. Fran can smell his interest, and his revulsion, at her displayed body and the metalwork he has so often chosen for himself, and the fur along her inner thighs matted with the leavings of other humes. She can smell them, though she does not wish it. Her own scent is more pleasant, Balthier's fingers reviving muscle-memory of the recent taunting friction and familiar pleasures of his touch. Fran braces herself, gouging the varnish on the wood. She cannot be comfortable, but she can be steady.

His hands are quick. After he has cast the last hoop aside, Balthier wipes his hands, her thighs with the scarves. The silks' weave is light, but her flesh is tender. Fran feels, wants, decides. She reaches for his trouser buttons, cupping over their slight stretch.

Balthier grabs her hand, "Fran--", twists his hips away. "How can you--"

"They took their pleasure in denying mine. Would you also--"

He flinches, and there is satisfaction in that hit. Now he looks at her. Fran remembers this face from the time early in their partnership, when his regard for her was still a small thing, too narrow to encompass both her ears and her mechanic's skill at the same time. His hand is warm around hers. Her nipples throb. Fran forgets how she had more patience then.

"No." Balthier moves to stand outside her legs, one arm behind her body, one arm in front. Fran lets him shift her, wrapping an arm about him in counter-balance. "I wouldn't deny you anything."

His eyes do not close, but they stare fixed at the far wall. His fingers are blunt and agile, long for a hume, and long enough to stir her. Fran leans into his neck, where Balthier smells of the acrid sweat of fear, for her, for himself. She smells mould and earth, a coppery tang that is rust. Experience and repetition have not made captivity easier for either of them to bear, but it is good to lose her nose in imagining his captivity, instead of remembering her own.

His hands are good. She can trust Balthier to know her well, and they both aim for speed. Fran's cry is soft, and he tenses as she clenches within, as her nails scrape his shoulder, slicing his shirt. Fran can scent his blood in the close air they breathe together. She would lick the scratches, but he is pulling out of her embrace.

Fran speaks a magick over them of healing and enervation, Balthier one of cleansing, drawing the silks over her lap, wiping the hand he had used. He unbuttons his cuffs, reaches behind himself to unlace his vest. He strips shirt and vest over his head in one fluid movement.

"Take one of them. Please. Either. Both, if they take your fancy," he says, holding forward his shirt.

The linen against her skin smells even stronger of his sweat, his musk, his fear, and inside the cuffs, it smells faintly of dry blood. The shirt-tails brush her legs.

Fran offers Balthier back his vest. He looks too naked-- sharp collarbone, stretch of chest-- distractingly so, but for the tension even more apparent across bare muscle. He steps near again, to straighten the line of his shirt across her shoulders. If she lifts her knees, tilts her hips, she would encompass him, but she can still smell that sourness on him, throttled desire and disgust. She wants him, his cock, his mouth and his skin, but she wants to be his choice as well.

"Am I so unclean?"

"No-- you're not-- it's not--" His hands brush down to her waist, hesitant, but accelerate to wind around her. "Oh, Fran, I'm sorry. They hurt you. I should have-- Oh, _what price the mummer's farce when the leading man arrives too late?_ "

Fran finally lets herself fall against him. Guilt and disgust smell alike, but one does not apologise to an object, a pet, an animal. Long years living among the humes have taught her that.

It is viera to scent and listen, but hume to look and speak, something Fran has learnt and then taught herself to mimic. She could tell Balthier how many of the governor's friends attended his party, that they Stopped her with her jaws shut, and how long it taken for them to forget that Stop must be recast. The bases of her ears ache from pulling, but hume cocks are like hume fingers, smooth, and narrower than most of them imagine. She could remind him that even Basch doesn't stretch her. But, facts will not limit Balthier's imagination.

They called her _viera_ , and she does not have the right words to explain how her race can become a slur. Balthier calls her Fran.

"I was pleased to see you when I did," Fran says. Balthier laughs, or chokes.

Then, the desk is bucking up under them, stuttering an inch to the right. One, two bombs echo through the floor.

"That must be our cue." Balthier presses his forehead against hers, his arms briefly tight before stepping back to give her space. "If I were an ignorant, aristocratic ass exiled to the provinces, I think I'd put my study in a room with at least one secret passage, don't you?"

Fran shuts her eyes, and breathes deeply, feeling for the draft that comes from what would seem blank shelves of books. Balthier destroys them with satisfaction.

\---

"Archades?"

Fran raises her hand from the navigation console. While she'd taken the first half of the tank in the Strahl's emergency shower, Balthier had set course for Balfonheim. Archades is closer, and Basch is a dear friend to them both. "Shall we go somewhere else?"

"I didn't think--" Balthier shakes his head, settling into the pilot's chair, absent to the black horizon but for the set of his jaw. In Romanby, a manse is burning. "Archades, it is. The winds willing and clear skies, we'll be within safe-hailing range around--?"

Fran checks the chart. "Soheim."

"And a few hours yet. I can wake you before the call," he offers.

"I am not tired."

Balthier reaches across the aisle to take her hand, and they fly south-east into the dawn.


End file.
